Class 4, Assignment 6a: Facebook Pages and Groups

Two features available to the public on Facebook are the use of "Pages" and "Groups". Although the two are similar in some ways, they are very different in other ways and can be used for a wide range of tasks or activities. Starting with groups, a Facebook group is a way to categorize people and friends to have easier access to certain categories of your life! Below is a screenshot of the Facebook "help" search for groups.

Facebook describes it as "easy to connect with specific sets of people", which is another way to say categorizing. On my Facebook, I have a group of all the people I work with, labeled with the name of the company we work for. This makes it simple to get information that is happening with the company itself as well as co-workers, an example of this could be posting "not feeling well, won't be in today" to give others a heads up if someone is sick.

Another feature on Facebook is the use of "Pages" which are in ways like groups, but not exactly the same. A page typically focuses on one main theme, as opposed to categorizing your friends. For example, pages are common when dealing with fan pages. I could go click "like" on Tom Brady's Facebook fan page, and I would be connected in a way with millions of people that also clicked "like" on that page, but it is a bit different than taking someones own friends, and breaking them into categories or "sets of people".

In the above picture, I clicked on my "Pages" link which brings me to posts made only by different pages that I have "liked". This is an easy way to explain the difference between pages and likes; the Immersive Education Facebook is a "Page", the main theme as I mentioned before is of course, Immersive Education. An example of a "Group" would be the category I have of all the people in this class (shown on the left of the screenshot called "Collaborative Com"), we are friends categorized together because we all meet at the same place (class, similar to co-workers), but it is different than being connected to thousands of people by liking the Immersive Education Facebook page.